Thursday, June 27, 2013

Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist.Irascible and forthright, Christopher Hitchens stood out as a man determined to do just that. In his younger years, a career-minded socialist, he emerged from the smoke of 9/11 a neoconservative “Marxist,” an advocate of America’s invasion of Iraq filled with passionate intensity. Throughout his life, he played the role of universal gadfly, whose commitment to the truth transcended the party line as well as received wisdom. But how much of this was imposture? In this highly critical study, Richard Seymour casts a cold eye over the career of the “Hitch” to uncover an intellectual trajectory determined by expediency and a fetish for power.As an orator and writer, Hitchens offered something unique and highly marketable. But for all his professed individualism, he remains a recognizable historical type—the apostate leftist. Unhitched presents a rewarding and entertaining case study, one that is also a cautionary tale for our times.

A devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.Drawing on first-hand testimony, previously unpublished documentation and broad sweeps through material released under the Freedom of Information Act, Christopher Hitchens mounts a devastating indictment of a man whose ambition and ruthlessness have directly resulted in both individual murders and widespread, indiscriminate slaughter.

"Over the last decade, pious Muslims all over the world have gone through contradictory transformations. Though public attention commonly rests on the turn toward violence, this book's stories of transformation to "moderate Islam" in a previously radical district in Istanbul exemplify another experience.

In a shift away from distrust of the state to partial secularization, Islamists in Turkey transitioned through a process of absorption into existing power structures. With rich descriptions of life in the district of Sultanbeyli, this unique work investigates how religious activists organized, how authorities defeated them, and how the emergent pro-state Justice and Development Party incorporated them.

As Tugal reveals, the absorption of a radical movement was not simply the foregone conclusion of an inevitable world-historical trend but an outcome of contingent struggles. With a closing comparative look at Egypt and Iran, the book situates the Turkish case in a broad historical context and discusses why Islamic politics have not been similarly integrated into secular capitalism elsewhere."

LIES is a new journal spearheaded by a feminist collective based in Oakland, Baltimore, Los Angeles and New York City.LIES is a communist journal against communists.LIES is a platform for certain conversations and critiques that are difficult, impossible or dangerous if cis men are in the room.LIES attacks the legacy of racism and transphobia that has plagued feminist organizing and strives to develop new ways of making autonomous feminist practices today that take pointed and militant attacks on white supremacy and transphobia as essential parts of feminist struggle.LIES came out of our experience within struggles. It seeks to embody and develop in print the practice of autonomy that we needed to save ourselves in the midst of movements squared on patriarchy and fueled by the subordination of everyone but white cis men.LIES draws its purpose and support from networks and circles of feminist, queer, and trans people, our friends and comrades to whom this journal is devoted.

Monday, June 24, 2013

In Big Brother, Mark Dice details actual high-tech spy gadgets, mind-reading machines, government projects, and emerging artificial intelligence systems that seem as if they came right out of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell’s famous book was first published in 1949, and tells the story of a nightmarish future where citizens have lost all privacy and are continuously monitored by the omniscient Big Brother surveillance system which keeps them obedient to a totalitarian government. The novel is eerily prophetic as many of the fictional systems of surveillance described have now become a reality. Mark Dice shows you the scary documentation that Big Brother is watching you, and is more powerful than you could imagine. Surveillance Cameras - Global Positioning Systems - Radio Frequency Identification - Mind Reading Machines - Neural Interfaces - Psychotronic Weapons - Information Technology - Orwellian Government Programs - The Nanny State - Orwellian Weapons -Artificial Intelligence -Cybernetic Organisms – A Closer Look at 1984 – Social Structure - The Control of Information - Perpetual State of War - The Personification of the Party - Telescreens - A Snitch Culture - Relationships - A Heartless Society - Foreign Countries Painted as Enemies - Power Hungry Officials - An Erosion of the Language - Double Think -And More!

Sunday, June 23, 2013

What is the 'state' and how can we best study it? This book investigates new ways of analysing the state.The contributors argue that the state is not a fixed and definite object. Our perceptions of it are constantly changing, and differ from person to person. What is your idea of the state if you are a refugee? Or if you are living in post-aparteid South Africa? Our perceptions are formed and sustained by evolving discourses and techniques -- these come from institutions such as government, but are also made by communities and individuals. The contributors examine how state structures are viewed from the inside, by official state bodies, composed of bureaucrats and politicians; and how these state manifestations are supported, reproduced or transformed at a local level. An outline of theoretical approaches is followed by nine case studies ranging from South Africa to Peru to Norway. With a good range of contributors including Cris Shore, Clifton Crais, Ana Alonso and Bruce Kapferer, this is a comprehensive critical analysis of anthropological approaches to the study of state formation.

"The Congress of the Peoples of the East held in Baku in September, 1920 holds a special place in the history of the Communist movement. It was the first attempt to appeal to the exploited and oppressed peoples in the colonial and semi-colonial countries to carry forward their revolutionary struggles under the banner of Marxism and with the support of the workers in Russia and the advanced countries of the world."

--Tom Kemp, Forward to the Congress of the Peoples of the East-Baku (1920)

Friday, June 21, 2013

In Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka’s work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.—Translated by Dana Polan with a foreword by Reda Bensmaia

Deleuze was fascinated by the machine and the technological. In this collective and determined effort to explore not only the usefulness of Deleuze in thinking about our new digital and biotechnological future but also the innovative nature of his ideas on the topic, contributors highlight Deleuze’s unique negotiation between the realms of philosophy, science, and art and point to the increasing dominance of technology in our everyday lives. Essays authored by William Bogard, Abigail Bray, Ian Buchanan, Verena Conley, Ian Cook, Tauel Harper, Timothy Murray, Saul Newman, Luciana Parisi, Patricia Pisters, Mark Poster, Horst Ruthrof, David Savat, Bent Meier Sørensen, and Eugene Thacker.

—Edited by Mark Poster and David Savat | Deleuze ConnectionsNOTE: There’s an extraordinary chapter featuring a study into video game analyses using Deleuzian thought that will knock your socks off — guaranteed!

The theory of permanent revolution is one of the defining principles of Trotskyism. Leon Trotsky first advanced the concept in 1905 as the strategy for overthrowing czarism and liberating Russian workers and peasants. The theory’s relevance to global revolt later became one of the key issues in the political battle between Trotsky and the forces of conservative Soviet repression personified by Joseph Stalin.
In the two major works presented in this book, Results and Prospects and The Permanent Revolution, Trotsky showed that developing countries must achieve workers rule in order to defeat tyranny and foreign domination. He explained that if socialism is to succeed it must expand beyond national borders and transform every aspect of political, economic and human relations. Leon Trotsky was a leading Bolshevik revolutionary and Marxist theorist. He was a central leader of the October Revolution and an influential politician in the early days of the Soviet Union. He was Commissar for Foreign Affairs, founder and commander of the Red Army and Commissar of War. He led the struggle against Stalin’s bureaucratization of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Trotsky was expelled from Stalin’s “Communist” Party and deported from the Soviet Union in the Great Purge. As the founder of the Fourth International, he continued in exile to encourage workers and oppressed peoples to unite against capitalism, and for socialist revolution.

The final work of Gilles Deleuze includes essays on such diverse literary figures as Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Carroll, and others, along with philosophers Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and others. Taken together, these 18 essays'all newly revised or published here for the first time'present a profoundly new approach to literature.

The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France, where faculty give public lectures on any topic of their choosing. Attended by thousands, Foucault’s lectures were seminal events in the world of French letters, and his ideas expressed there remain benchmarks of contemporary critical inquiry.

Foucault’s wide-ranging lectures at this school, delivered throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, clearly influenced his groundbreaking books, especially The History of Sexuality and Discipline and Punish. In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the “self” and the “care of the self” were conceived during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for our own questions about subjectivity and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought. This series of lectures continues to throw new light on Foucault’s final works, and shows the full depth of his engagement with ancient thought. Lucid and provocative, The Hermeneutics of the Subject reveals Foucault at the height of his powers.

The Solidarity Federation’s book, Fighting for ourselves: anarcho-syndicalism and the class struggle, aims to recover some of the lost history of the workers’ movement, in order to set out a revolutionary strategy for the present conditions. In clear and accessible prose, the book sets out the anarcho-syndicalist criticisms of political parties and trade unions, engages with other radical traditions such as anarchism, syndicalism and dissident Marxisms, explains what anarcho-syndicalism was in the twentieth century, and how it’s relevant - indeed, vital - for workers today.

Considered one of the most important works of Deleuze, and long-awaited in English, The Logic of Sense begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status of meaning and meaninglessness, and seeks the ‘place’ where sense and nonsense collide. Written in an innovative form and witty style, The Logic of Sense is an essay in literary and psychoanalytic theory as well as philosophy, and helps to illuminate such works as Anti-Oedipus.

Marking a major development in Foucault’s thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the Collège de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of “bio-power,” introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault’s attention turns, focusing on a history of “governmentality” from the first centuries of the Christian era to the emergence of the modern nation state. These lectures show that the trenchant analysis of biopower, “power over life”, which Foucault had begun in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and which he pursues here in terms of technologies of security, led him to a decisively deeper and more radical formulation of his guiding problematic—what he called “the government of the self and others”—the issue that would serve as the basis for all his subsequent work. Security, Territory and Population might thus properly be called the ‘missing link’ that reveals the underlying unity of Foucault’s later thought.
Excerpt:

We tried to show what the problems were that this “police” had to address; the extent to which the role it was assigned was different from the role that is later given to the institution of the police; and what was expected of it in ensuring the state’s growth in terms of two objectives: to enable it to stake out and improve its position in the game of rivalries and competition between European states, and to guarantee internal order through the “welfare” of individuals. Development of the state of (military-economic) competition, and development of the Wohlfahrt state (of wealth-tranquility-happiness): these are the two principles that “police” as a rational art of government must be able to coordinate. At this time “police” was conceived of as a sort [of] “technology of state forces.”—Translated by Graham Burchell

Partial archive of a series of small ‘pocketbooks’ in the late 1970s/early 1980s entitled ‘Spectacular Times’ by Larry Law. They serve as a brief introduction to situationist ideas. Each consists of newspaper clippings, quotations, handwritten text by Law and illustrations, all compiled and arranged with great humour!

MUST-READ: As early as the second half of the nineteenth century, socialist movements largely adopted the Marxist critique of the notion of the free laborer, according to which free laborers are alienated in two senses: they are alienated insofar as they do not have control over their life (i.e., they are denied the ability to choose their activity, while both the means of production and the outcome of their labor belong to others), but they are also alienated insofar as liberal law and ideology rob them of the consciousness of their exploitation (since they are invited to consider themselves as owners of their labor power and thus as subjects endowed with a freedom that is equivalent to that of their employer). However, as mentioned above, socialists did not merely recognize and expose the fictitious and ideological character of the freedom granted to the free worker: they also seized on this construct, both in an effort to bolster the price of labor power (through the work of labor unions) and to criticize working conditions (for violating the essential distinction between man and commodity, between the laborer in his or her inalienable dignity and the labor power that he or she owns and rents out).This dual way of appropriating the figure of the free worker has allowed the labor movement to achieve considerable victories, compounded in the advent and development of the welfare state in its various dimensions. However, in the past three decades, claims based on class interests (e.g., demands for better wages and better job security) or humanist appeals (e.g., “we are not commodities”) have become less and less successful. Though this evolution, which is distinctive of the neoliberal era, can be read in terms of the crisis of the Fordist socioeconomic compact and its impact on the bargaining power of labor vis-à-vis capital, my contention is that it also reflects the decline of the type of free laborer and its gradual replacement by a new form of subjectivity: human capital. Indeed, as I shall argue, the rise of human capital as a dominant subjective form is a defining feature of neoliberalism.

In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault deals with the emergence in the early seventeenth century of a new understanding of war as the permanent basis of all institutions of power, a hidden presence within society that could be deciphered by an historical analysis. Tracing this development, Foucault outlines the genealogy of power and knowledge that had become his dominant concern.
Excerpt:In order to make a concrete analysis of power relations, we must abandon the juridical model of sovereignty. That model in effect pre-supposes that the individual is a subject with natural rights or primitive powers; it sets itself the task of accounting for the ideal genesis of the State; and finally, it makes the law the basic manifestation of power. We should be trying to study power not on the basis of the primitive terms of the relationship, but on the basis of the relationship itself, to the extent that it is the relationship itself that determines the elements on which it bears: rather than asking ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surrendered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects. Similarly, rather than looking for the single form or the central point from which all forms of power derive, either by way of consequence of development, we must begin by letting them operate in their multiplicity, their differences, their specificity, and their reversibility; we must therefore study them as relations of force that intersect, refer to one another, converge, or, on the contrary, come into conflict and strive to negate one another.'Translated by David Macey

“A series of interviews with Foucault, translated from Italian and from French. The project began as an elucidation of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, with hope of relating it to Italian feminism, but ended with a significantly greater scope.”

What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant contemporary philosophers, this question of “novelty” is the major problem posed by Bergson’s work. In this companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital. Furthermore, Deleuze interprets and integrates these themes into a single philosophical program, arguing that Bergson’s philosophical intentions are methodological. They are more than a polemic against the limitations of science and common sense, particularly in Bergson’s elaboration of the explanatory powers of the notion of duration - thinking in terms of time rather than space. Bergsonism is also important to an understanding of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson.—Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam

This dictionary, the first dedicated to the work of Gilles Deleuze, offers an in-depth and lucid introduction to one of the most influential figures in continental philosophy. It defines and contextualizes more than 150 terms relating to Deleuze’s philosophy, including “becoming,” “body without organs,” “deterritorialization,” “difference,” “repetition,” and “rhizome.” The entries also explore Deleuze’s intellectual influences and the ways in which his ideas have shaped philosophy, feminism, cinema studies, postcolonial theory, geography, and cultural studies. More than just defining and describing specific terms, the dictionary elaborates on Deleuze’s ideas to reveal the varied applications of his philosophy.The contributors, who include some of the most prominent Deleuze scholars, bring their expert knowledge and critical opinion to bear on the entries. Their work provides a range of theoretical, historical, and aesthetic contexts for anyone interested in Deleuzian thought.Contributors include: Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia; Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht University; Claire Colebrook, University of Edinburgh; Tom Conley, Harvard University; Eugene Holland, Ohio State University; Tamsin Lorraine, Swarthmore College; Paul Patton, University of New South Wales; Kenneth Surin, Duke University; Alberto Toscano, Goldsmiths College.

One of the puzzling things about all the theories about the origins of money that we’ve been looking at so far is that they almost completely ignore the evidence of anthropology. Anthropologists do have a great deal of knowledge of how economies within stateless societies actually worked-how they still work in places where states and markets have been unable to completely break up existing ways of doing things. There are innumerable studies of, say, the use of cattle as money in eastern or southern Africa, of shell money in the Americas (wampum being the most famous example) or Papua New Guinea, bead money, feather money, the use of iron rings, cowries, spondylus shells, brass rods, or woodpecker scalps. The reason that this literature tends to be ignored by economists is simple: “primitive currencies” of this sort is only rarely used to buy and sell things, and even when they are, never primarily to buy and sell everyday items such as chickens or eggs or shoes or potatoes. Rather than being employed to acquire things, they are mainly used to rearrange relations between people. Above all, to arrange marriages and to settle disputes, particularly those arising from murders or personal injury.NOTE: An obvious must-read for any serious thinker.

What is terror? What are its roots and its results -- and what part does it play in human experience and history? This volume offers a number of timely and original anthropological insights into the ways in which acts of terror -- and reactions to those acts -- impact on the lives of virtually everyone in the world today, as perpetrators, victims or witnesses. As the contributors to this volume demonstrate, what we have come to regard as acts of terror -- whether politically motivated, or state-sanctioned -- have assumed many different forms and provoked widely differing responses throughout the world.At a deeper level, the contributors explore the work of the imagination in extreme contexts of danger, such as those of terror and terrorism. By stressing the role of the imagination, and its role in amplifying the effects of experience, this collection brings together a coherent set of analyses that offer innovative and unexpected ways of understanding a major global problem of contemporary life.

Sunday, June 9, 2013

Following the publication of his magnum opus L'être et l'événement (Being and Event) in 1988, Alain Badiou has been acclaimed as one of France's greatest living philosophers. Since then, he has released a dozen books, including Manifesto for Philosophy, Conditions, Metapolitics and Logiques des mondes (Logics of Worlds), many of which are now available in English translation. Badiou writes on an extraordinary array of topics, and his work has already had an impact upon studies in the history of philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, political philosophy, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and ontology. This volume takes up the challenge of explicating, extending and, in many places, criticizing Badiou's stunningly original theses. Above all, the essays collected here put Badiou's concepts to the test in a confrontation with the four great headings that he himself has identified as essential to our humanity: science, love, art and politics. Many of the contributors have already been recognized as outstanding translators of and commentators on Badiou's work; they appear here with fresh voices also destined to make a mark.

The phrase "the meaning of life" for many seems a quaint notion fit for satirical mauling by Monty Python or Douglas Adams. But in this spirited Very Short Introduction, famed critic Terry Eagleton takes a serious if often amusing look at the question and offers his own surprising answer. Eagleton first examines how centuries of thinkers and writers--from Marx and Schopenhauer to Shakespeare, Sartre, and Beckett--have responded to the ultimate question of meaning. He suggests, however, that it is only in modern times that the question has become problematic. But instead of tackling it head-on, many of us cope with the feelings of meaninglessness in our lives by filling them with everything from football to sex, Kabbala, Scientology, "New Age softheadedness," or fundamentalism. On the other hand, Eagleton notes, many educated people believe that life is an evolutionary accident that has no intrinsic meaning. If our lives have meaning, it is something with which we manage to invest them, not something with which they come ready made. Eagleton probes this view of meaning as a kind of private enterprise, and concludes that it fails to holds up. He argues instead that the meaning of life is not a solution to a problem, but a matter of living in a certain way. It is not metaphysical but ethical. It is not something separate from life, but what makes it worth living--that is, a certain quality, depth, abundance and intensity of life. Here then is a brilliant discussion of the problem of meaning by a leading thinker, who writes with a light and often irreverent touch, but with a very serious end in mind.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Peter Singer identifies the central vision that unifies Marx's thought, enabling us to grasp Marx's views as a whole. He sees him as a philosopher primarily concerned with human freedom, rather than as an economist or a social scientist. In plain English, he explains alienation, historical materialism, the economic theory of Capital, and Marx's ideas of communism, and concludes with an assessment of Marx's legacy.

Hegel is regarded as one of the most influential figures on modern political and intellectual development. After painting Hegel's life and times in broad strokes, Peter Singer goes on to tackle some of the more challenging aspects of Hegel's philosophy. Offering a broad discussion of Hegel's ideas and an account of his major works, Singer explains what have often been considered abstruse and obscure ideas in a clear and inviting manner.

The transformation of the Turkish state is examined here in the context of globalized frames of neo-liberal capitalism and contemporary schemas of Islamic politics. It shows how the historical emergence of two distinct yet intertwined imaginaries of state structuring, laiklik and Islam, continues to influence Turkish politics today.

This book examines Islam's engagement with the reorganization of the global economy. By examining the incorporation of Islam into the existing relations of the Turkish state from the late Ottoman Empire to the present day, the author demonstrates how political Islam interacts with the global restructuring of classes, states and political actors. Atasoy challenges the view of Islamist politics as an anti-Modern, anti-Western force that is fundamentally opposed to the global economy and instead argues that political Islam is cosmopolitan and embedded in processes which incorporate Western modernity into local cultural practices.